TIME Coverage 1974

1973 Man Of The Year: Judge John J. Sirica

(TIME, January 7, 1974) -- More than any other news event, the multifaceted Watergate affair, the worst political scandal in U.S. history, dominated the news in 1973. As it gradually unfolded, involving more and more areas of President Richard Nixon's administration, it revealed a shocking disdain for both the spirit and the letter of the law at the highest levels of government. Ultimately, not only the primacy of the rule of law on which the American system rests but the presidency of Nixon stood challenged, plunging the U.S. into a grave governmental crisis. Fittingly, it was the American legal system which had trained so many of the malefactors caught in the Watergate web, that came to the rescue.

One judge, stubbornly and doggedly pursuing the truth in his courtroom regardless of its political implications, forced Watergate into the light of investigative day. One judge, insisting that not all the panoply of the presidency entitled Nixon to withhold material evidence from the Watergate prosecutors, brought the White House tapes and documents out of hiding. For these deeds, and as a symbol of the American judiciary's insistence of the priority of law throughout the sordid Watergate saga of 1973, TIME's Man of the Year is federal Judge John Joseph Sirica.

A Telltale Tape Deepens Nixon's Dilemma

(TIME, January 28, 1974) -- The report was coldly scientific, its source unassailably objective, its grave import unmistakably clear: at least as late as last October, an effort to conceal evidence in the Watergate scandal was still in operation in the innermost reaches of Richard Nixon's White House.

No such direct conclusion was explicitly drawn, of course, by the six professional sound recording and electronics experts who had exhaustively examined a presidential tape recording containing a mysterious 18-minute deletion of a Watergate conversation between Nixon and his aide, H.R. Haldeman. But in reporting to federal Judge John J. Sirica that the conversation had been erased by pushing buttons on a tape recorder at least five -- and probably nine -- times, they had found that this destruction of evidence was deliberate. In the wake of the court-appointed panel's devastating findings, the nation once again experienced the dismay of knowing that FBI agents were back in the White House, quizzing Nixon's closest associates in search of those who had committed a criminal act. Unlike an earlier foray into the White House -- shortly after the wiretap-burglary of Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate in June 1972 -- the FBI agents this time have an imposing prime suspect: the president himself.

Seven Charged, A Report And A Briefcase

(TIME, March 11, 1974) -- A federal grand jury composed of 23 American citizens last week presented a grave and most exceptional charge: a criminal conspiracy existed at the highest levels of the Richard Nixon's Administration. The accused include four of the president's most intimate and influential former official and political associates. And by clear implication in the language of the indictment, the jurors disclosed their belief that the president has lied about at least one potentially criminal act of his own in the still-spreading scandal. The indicted seven were former Attorney General and head of Nixon's re-election committee John Mitchell, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, former Nixon chief adviser John D. Ehrlichman, Nixon's special counsel Charles W. Colson, lawyer and political coordinator Robert C. Mardian, Haldeman's chief aide Gordon C. Strachan, and Washington attorney Kenneth W. Parkinson.

The President's Strategy For Survival

(TIME, March 25, 1974) -- Richard Nixon is rapidly running out of options in his struggle to survive Watergate. Last week he exercised a fresh one. Pushing his Special Counsel James St. Clair out front in a political as well as legal role, Nixon embarked on a drive to save himself by appealing directly to the public and assailing the tactics of the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating his conduct in office. It was much too early to assess the public reaction, but the impact on the House of Representatives was immediate. The strategy backfired, and impeachment sentiment rose.

The President Gambles On Going Public

(TIME, May 13, 1974) -- In still another effort "to put Watergate behind us," to show once an for all "that the president has nothing to hide in this matter," President Richard Nixon announced in a televised address last week that he was making public 1,254 pages of transcribed recordings of his personal conversations about the Watergate scandal with his most trusted aides. In "placing my trust in the basic fairness of the American people," Nixon declared the greatest bet of his lifetime of high-risk politics, making a desperate and dangerous wager on his place in history.

Richard Nixon's Collapsing Presidency

(TIME, May 20, 1974) -- Before releasing transcripts of 46 private conversations with aides, Richard Nixon had somehow deluded himself into thinking that the American people would conclude that the text proved him innocent of wrongdoing in the Watergate scandal. Moreover, he had reckoned that the portrait of a foul-mouthed, conniving, amoral president revealed by the transcripts would soon face from public memory. Instead, publication of the transcripts produced a floodtide of outrage and indignation as ever-growing numbers of Nixon supporters abandoned him in Congress and the nation. Resignation rumors were spawned faster than the White House could deny them, and a mood of crisis gripped Washington. Newspaper editors and publishers in the Republican heartland studied the transcripts with sinking hearts and mounting dismay. One after another, they reversed their previous positions and wrote editorials calling for Nixon's resignation or impeachment. And the House Judiciary Committee, in a solemn televised ceremony began formally to consider "whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its constitutional power to impeach Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States of America."

Tacking Toward The Impeachment Line

(TIME, July 8, 1974) -- Political partisanship flared openly in the House Judiciary Committee last week, shaking the fragile facade of impartiality that had enhanced its impeachment inquiry. Despite angry objections from most Republicans and few Democrats, the committee set July 12 as the deadline for completing its questioning of a limited number of witnesses. It set July 15 as the date to begin debating and voting on articles of impeachment, which are now being prepared by its staff. It targeted the week of July 22 for completing that vote. Special Counsel John Doar will be given 10 days after that to prepare a final committee report for transmittal to the full House.

The Tide Turns Back Toward Impeachment

(TIME, July 22, 1974) -- In recent weeks President Nixon has had reason to believe that he was on an upswing in his battle to turn back the advance of impeachment. His trips to the Middle East and the Soviet Union were marked by some modest successes. At home the impeachment drive in Congress seemed to be faltering, slowed by legalistic detail and partisan bickering. And there were no new Watergate sensations, and the public appeared weary of the deepest political scandal in U.S. history.

But last week the mood in Washington changed abruptly. Impeachment once again picked up momentum in Congress, as the House Judiciary Committee wound up its examination of Nixon's "defense" witnesses, who turned out to be markedly unhelpful to the president. Meanwhile, Nixon had his own day in court as Special Counsel James St. Clair squared off against Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski before the Supreme Court in three hours of historic arguments about presidential privilege. At issue was whether the president must turn over 64 more White House tapes to Judge John Sirica for use as evidence in the trial of seven other Nixon aides.

Other troubles cropped up this week for Nixon: A federal jury in Washington convicted John Ehrlichman, one of the president's two former closest advisers, of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist and of lying to both the FBI and a federal grand jury about authorizing the break-in of the psychiatrist's office. The House Judiciary Committee released more than 4,000 pages of evidence that it has compiled so far on the Watergate break-in and coverup that proved to be fresh and damning evidence indicating that Nixon was deeply involved in the coverup. The committee also made public its own carefully transcribed version of the White House tapes containing some astounding discrepancies with the president's edited version.

The Republicans' Moment of Truth

(TIME, July 29, 1974) -- After leading seven months of investigation, House Judiciary Committee Special Counsel John Doar became an advocate for impeachment as he presented 29 overlapping articles to the 38-member committee on which the case could be made against Richard Nixon. The committee is scheduled to start voting this week and a simple majority of any single article would be enough to impeach the president. For the 17 Republicans on the committee, the moment of truth has finally arrived. Like the 21 Democrats, they must vote on the most serious American political question in a century -- but they also must make a decision for or against their own party leader. Most political observers in Washington believe that the committee -- and later the full House -- will impeach Nixon, but the size and the character of the vote is regarded as a crucial factor in deciding whether the case against the president will also succeed in the Senate.

The Fateful Vote To Impeach

(TIME, August 5, 1974) -- After four garrulous days, the talking stopped. The room was silent, and so, in a sense, was a watching nation. One by one, the strained and solemn faces of the 38 members of the House Judiciary Committee were focused on by the television cameras. One by one, their names were called, One by one, they cast the most momentous vote of their political lives, or of any representative of the American people in a century. Six Republicans joined all 21 Democrats to recommend that the House of Representatives impeach Richard M. Nixon and seek his removal from the presidency through a Senate trial. The impressive bipartisan nature of the vote increased the probability that the full House would also vote to impeach and effectively rebutted the increasingly shrill claims from White House officials that the impeachment inquiry was a highly partisan "witch hunt."

The impeachment action came at the end of a week in which the president's chances of completing his second term in office fell to their lowest point. Earlier in the week, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon had no authority to withhold the tape recordings of his White House conversations from Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski.

Time For Healing

(TIME, August 19, 1974) -- It was over. At last, after so many months of poisonous suspicion, a kind of undeclared civil war that finally engaged all three branches of the American government, the ordeal had ended. As the Spirit of '76 in one last errand jetted over central Missouri carrying Richard Nixon to his retirement, Gerald Rudolph Ford stood in the East Room of the White House, placed his hand upon his eldest son's Bible, and repeated the presidential oath "to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

It was the first time in American history that a president had resigned his office. The precedent was melancholy, but it was hardly traumatic. The damage had already been done. Mostly the nation was massively grateful to have it ended. As Ford said at his swearing-in, "Our long national nightmare is over."

The denouement was jarring in its swift resolution and therefore a bit surreal. Nearly 800 days after the Watergate break-in, 289 days after the Saturday Night Massacre, 97 days after the White House transcripts were released, 12 days after the Supreme Court voted, 8-0, that the president must surrender 64 more tapes, five days after the House Judiciary Committee voted out articles of impeachment, Nixon's defense finally vanished. On Monday he issued the June 23, 1972 transcript which amounted to a confession to obstruction of justice and to lying to the American people and his own defense counsel. With that his clock had run out.

Nixon's nationally televised resignation speech was a peculiar performance. In some ways, it sounded like a State of the Union address, a familiar recitation of his achievement in office. He admitted no guilt, only casually did he mention mistakes made "in the best interest of the nation." Yet, in a way, he smoothed the process of transition by sounding rather eerily, as if his resignation was, after all, a sort of parliamentary setback -- no great dislocation. If some expected a bitter, angry valedictory, Nixon was controlled and ultimately conciliatory. Nixon once said that the test of a people is the way it handles the transition of power, and last week -- in his resignation speech if not in his mawkish, self-pitying White House goodbye -- he deserved credit at least for helping to bring off the transition with dignity in what must have been the most painful moment of his life.